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Looking at this picture, I can't decide if, instead of being a kind of cute, grown-up joke, somebody might think it's actually offensive. I mean I can think of a few people who might. Is a picture of a toddler with a cigarette in her mouth actually funny or not? It is to me only because I can still remember that slightly edgy tang to the smell of the tobacco when my parents took out a cigarette, the crinkle of the paper in the packs, but oddly not the ashtrays so much. Perhaps my mother was really good about emptying them. Considering I've never been a smoker myself, I remember my childhood among smoking parents and their friends with a certain fondness for it. My father likes to say that when my sister and I were very little and were playing with our cat, if he threw an empty cigarette pack down, all three of us would scramble for it. Now, in some ways, that sounds like the worst kind of feral parenting. But this was in a posh apartment in Paris. What you can't see is the rest of the picture that I cropped, which is my mother in the foreground, bending towards a table for a light, fag in her mouth, short skirt and long hair. Put it all in colour and take away the marble fireplace, and it's a picture from a hand-wringing documentary on the decline in family values.

I dont' know what I'm trying to get at with this really. Except about how context shapes perceptions. And how innocence can become corrupted with hindsight, history reinterpreted through current assumptions that played no part in the original scene. Bit of a leap, but it's getting late. And I was thinking about reshaping history because of the annoyance of the day newswise, which was this article about a prayer group in the US that prays in the gas stations for cheaper gas and actually thinks that God's been bothering to listen. Nothing to do with market forces at all. I guess the bit that really got to me was reworking the words to 'We shall overcome' into 'We'll have cheaper g-a-a-s'. Selfish nutters.